The problem with great ideas is that they needed to be followed up, otherwise that's all they end up being. Yesterday, I had a great idea for a book that could be ready for the summer, only to make it happen I need to create time that I haven't got. In an attempt to get around this minor detail, I've decided to try and 'organise'. I believe this is a tool used by many the whole world over to get on in life, but it has never been for me. My lack of organisation is mostly based on the fact that all the things I ever thought were great, were all done on the spur of the moment and didn't take very long to get off the ground. I work with people who keep huge notebooks of phone calls and conversations, spreadsheets... my thinking has always been that if you can't hold the information in your head, it couldn't have been very interesting in the first place. While some may scoff, I would like to add that I've never missed a deadline yet. Watching people cocking about with cells, rows and columns and colouring things in seems like the biggest waste of time of all. Rather like all the apps on your iphone, you only click on them because they're there most of the time. I recently purged about twenty off my iphone and now can't even remember what any of them were. That's how valuable they must have been. In the time it takes to format your spreadsheet to a standard you like, you can easily write three pages of material for something.

So I guess, looking at this predicament logically, the secret of organisation lies not actually in being organised but more in not taking part in anything that isn't constructive to the job in hand. Yeah... I think that's what I'm trying to say...

I find myself making a lot of decisions lately. I'm seriously considering buying a record deck and putting some soul back into the music that I like. There's some decent systems around if you look hard enough and it would be pretty cool to buy all of the stuff I grew up on all over again. There must have been some reason I had hundreds upon hundreds ofback in 'the day'. There's an easy 'top ten' that could be rustled up when doing this - I'll nail it down here:

10. Lords of the New Church: Is Nothing Sacred?

9. Prince: Purple Rain

8. Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

7. Alice Cooper: Love It To Death

6. Journey: Frontiers

5. The Waterboys: A Pagan Place

4. Kiss: Alive!

3. Rick Springfield: Living in Oz

2. Prince: Sign of the Times

1. David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars

That's pretty much my entire adolescence summed up in ten lines. Not my all time top ten albums, but certainly all very memorable for different reasons. They had better all sound as good now as they did back then on an Amstrad tower system. Talking of which, a few days ago, I was writing some other stuff and found these two items regarding Stiv Bators (Lords of the New Church) that pretty much sum up the unpredictability of checking out bands at a club level in the 80s:

"The Lords became notorious for their live shows. A devotee of Iggy Pop, Bators had developed a fearless reputation in his Dead Boys days and continued such antics with The Lords, the most famous being the time he reportedly hanged himself during a show. Bator's stunt went awry and he was pronounced clinically dead for several minutes. Nonetheless, Bators survived and The Lords recorded two more successful albums."

and

"The Lords of the New Church broke up in 1989, when Bators injured his back and guitarist Brian James secretly began advertising for a replacement singer. When Bators found out he played the encore of the band's final show donning a T-shirt with James' newspaper ad printed across the front, he then proceeded to fire the remaining members on-stage."

This is why music was exciting. You never knew what was going to happen from one week to the next - it also took ages to find out about stuff. This meant you could dine out on an event like this if you were lucky enough to have been there without some dick reading it online and telling the world before you even got home.

Re: Yesterday's post about BlackBerry phone. After no small amount of research, I eventually opted to hitch my wagon to the Nokia C3-01. Wi-fi, email and just about everything else set up in less than twenty minutes. Nice phone with some very cool features. Does what a phone should. Within two years, the little BlackBerry will be an obsolete piece of kit unless they change their game plan. I won't dwell on it, but seriously, what a piece of dirt.

Stiv Bators would never own a BlackBerry either.